Storage, Not Generation, is the Challenge to Renewable Energy

This post written by Gregg Maryniak: Chairman of the Energyand Environmental Systems Track of Singularity University and the Secretary of the X PRIZE Foundation

If you read newspapers, blogs and other popular reports on renewable energy, you are very likely hearing almost exclusively about power generation advances in solar cell or wind turbine efficiency or ways to reduce production costs.   But exciting as these steps are, an examination of where our energy comes from todayshows that even after decades of improvement in renewable energy systems, more than 95% of the energy in the United States is still provided by fossil fuels, nuclear power and traditional hydropower.   So, what is missing from the present picture that could dramatically advance the use of renewable energy?  Economical energy storage.

The phenomenon of the world’s so-called addiction to fossil fuels is actually an aspect of a greater underlying energy truth.  What society really wants and needs is energy on demand.